By Samantha Donndelinger and Chloe Bragg

“Will you let me shake hands with all my friends?” Fred Alexander’s words rang out in the air before the flames engulfed him.

It was January 15, 1901 in Leavenworth, Kansas and Alexander was known as a young man who had many friends around the town where he was born and raised. He lived with his father, mother and six siblings.

He was born in May 1878 and could read and write by the time he was seven years old, according to Census data. He served in the siege of Santiago, the last major operation in the Spanish-American War and was about 21 when he returned to Kansas after being discharged in good standing, military records show.

But in the winter of 1901, two years after he returned from the war, the authorities charged Alexander with two horrific crimes.

Pearl Forbes, a 19-year-old girl, had been found dead in a ravine outside of town the year earlier. Though local police believed that Ms. Forbes was killed during a robbery and there was no evidence suggesting that she had been sexually assaulted, a coroner’s jury declared that she had been strangled “for the purpose of rape,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit research and criminal justice organization that has documented thousands of lynchings around the country.

For months, police searched for a suspect. A reward was announced in local newspapers, and pressure was on the mayor to find the killer. A few names were floated, all Black men, but no charges stuck.

Then, on January 12, 1901, Eva Roth, another young white woman, accused Alexander of assaulting her. Three days later, Alexander was arrested and charged with both crimes. “He liked to whistle,” reported the Evening Sun, and someone had reported hearing a whistle in the air on the night of Forbes’ murder.

Alexander, who was 22 at the time, was brought to the local jail in Leavenworth and locked in a cell to await his appearance in court.

Word spread of the arrest quickly, however, and that same day, hundreds of enraged townsfolk gathered their weapons. Some brought sledge hammers and hatchets. Others brought torches and chains. The crowd forced its way into the jail and pushed past the sheriff on duty, local newspapers reported.

As the mob became more agitated, the authorities moved Alexander to a more secure location: the county jail.

The mob followed. They busted open Alexander’s cell and grabbed him, cutting him with a hatchet and wounding him around the stomach and arms with the hammers. Then, the crowd, which included local merchants, shop owners, and townsfolk, hauled Alexander to the ravine where Pearl Forbes’ body was found and demanded his confession. According to local papers, he defended his innocence, but when no one believed him, he asked to say his goodbyes instead.

“Can I see my mother?” he pleaded, according to the Leavenworth Times.

His mother, Mary Alexander, “kept house” at the home she owned in town along with her husband, Alfred Alexander, Census data reported.

Mary saved the brass-buttoned navy canvas coat he wore as part of his 9th US Cavalry Unit uniform and, according to the Leavenworth Times, she vowed to keep it forever. But she was unable to save her son from the mob that dragged Alexander through the streets.

Dozens of hands swarmed around him as they chained him to an iron stake and doused him with 22 gallons of kerosene, newspapers reported. “Confess!” they shouted.

Ms. Forbes’s father, William Forbes, pushed his way from the crowd, holding a match, according to local papers at the time. He looked Alexander in the eyes.

“Mr. Forbes, you have the wrong man,” Alexander said, according to the Leavenworth Times. “If I had been guilty, I would have said so.”

Forbes said nothing, local newspapers reported. Instead, he lit the match.

The lynching’s occurrence in a Northern state sent shockwaves throughout the Midwest. The Detroit Journal lamented that Kansas had “violated all her traditions and covered herself with a disgrace that can never be washed away.” The St. Joseph Gazette exclaimed, “[S]hame, shame upon the people of Leavenworth.”

At the turn of the 20th century, white men were terrified by the prospect of Black men crossing the color line in Leavenworth. Alexander, however, spoke with everyone, even chatting with many of the white prostitutes who worked the streets at the time, writes historian and professor at Emporia State University, Christopher C. Lovett, in a 2010 Kansas History article. According to Lovett, whether consciously or not, Alexander refused to be constrained by social segregation. It wasn’t the whistle that damned him, but the threat of confidence that it represented.

“Kansas is kind of a strange state; it is both where the south and the west meet,” said Randal Jelks, a professor of history and Afro-Studies at the University of Kansas.

He explained that Kansas was teetering along progressive and conservative lines in 1901.

“Politically, Kansas is doing things that are progressive, like permitting women to vote and issuing child labor laws,” he said. “But Kansas is also fooling around with segregation. No governor at that time would have wanted that stain to be on the state.”

The governor at the time, William Stanley, blamed the local sheriff for allowing the lynching to take place. “The sheriff is to blame, and nobody else,” Stanley said in the Los Angeles Herald, calling the sheriff a “despicable scoundrel or a coward” for allowing the mob to take Alexander from the jail.

One man who witnessed the lynching said he saw a policeman strike Alexander in the head in the presence of the sheriff, who “didn’t pay any attention to it,” The Labor Chronicles reported. In the same newspaper, the sheriff dismissed the accusations that he was to blame. “No sensible man is going to believe a lot of disreputable negros who have no support from the better class of colored people,” he told the  Labor Chronicles.

Behind the scenes, Alexander’s father, Albert, was working to ensure his son received justice. The Kansas Afro-American Council, a branch of the national civil rights movement, heard about Albert Alexander’s efforts and swiftly mobilized. The family secured a lawyer to try to initiate legal action against the town of Leavenworth for failing to protect Alexander while he was in custody, according to local newspapers.

No one was ever apprehended, and when the dust settled, Governor Stanley refused to remove the local sheriff from office.

Even though there wasn’t an arrest, this case was significant to the social justice movement because the people of Kansas had tried to hold an official accountable. “This is something that the NAACP will do about 20 years later,” said Shawn Leigh Alexander, professor of African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He bears no relation to Fred Alexander.

The Afro-American Council’s executive committee, led by attorney James H. Guy of Topeka, met with Governor Stanley, Alexander wrote in the 2007 Great Plains Quarterly article, “Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution.” In a proclamation, the governor agreed to offer a $500 reward for the apprehension and arrest of the killers. If the Council could not apprehend the “unknown party” within ninety days, the reward would be rescinded.

In addition to fighting the officials at the time, the Afro-American Council tried to challenge the coverage of the lynching in the white press. White presses such as the Evening Standard and the Leavenworth Times, painted a delicate picture of Pearl Forbes by calling her “beautiful and respectable” while portraying Fred Alexander as a “large man and a brute who was a threat to white women in Leavenworth.” In reality, military records show that Alexander was only 5’4.”

“To justify the lynching and the violence, [the press] have to create a beast,” Professor Alexander said. “There’s not a lot about him …We do that in the press today, too, right? They find the person they want to be the beast. Ultimately, that was the case for Alexander.”

“Fred Alexander deserved a trial. Fred Alexander deserved justice, not to be murdered by vigilante violence. If he did the crime they accused him of, which there is evidence that probably proves otherwise, then he should have been charged with that crime,” he said.

Leavenworth, Kansas, 1901, Leavenworth County Historical Society

In 2020, a coalition of community members and local activists in Leavenworth, Kansas, began advocating for public acknowledgment of the lynchings of Fred Alexander and two other Black men in Leavenworth County. They partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative through its Community Remembrance Project to erect a historical marker to memorialize the victims. The marker was unveiled on June 15, 2023 during a ceremony at the Richard Allen Cultural Center & Museum Garden.

The marker, crafted with detailed inscriptions in gold lettering, recounts the tragic deaths of Fred Alexander and two other Black men who were lynched, Richard Wood and Silas Wilson.

“Now, when you drive into that town, there is a landmark acknowledging his murder and giving you a brief history of the tragedy that happened,” Alexander said.

Jelks emphasized the importance of the marker for the people of Leavenworth today.

“I think we ought to be reminded,” Jelks said. “The reminder is not to stain the town but to remind us that anti-democratic behavior can go on anywhere. We need to be reminded of those things, not just for the negative but also for the positive. People organized to resist. They organized a council to say, ‘This is not right.’ That’s democratic as well.”